Back in August of 1986, when I was working for the entertainment section of the Tulsa World, I wrote a review of a Mabee Center concert headlining singer Cristy Lane. Lane, as you might remember, was still riding fairly high at the time, thanks in great part to the huge splash made by her country-gospel chart-topper “One Day at a Time,” some six years earlier.
Looking again at that review, however, I saw that I was most impressed by a local opening act named Mary Kay Harshaw, whom I called “a convincing singer” with “a natural, unaffected stage presence, excellent range, and fine dynamics.”
Nearly 40 years later, she’s still all those things. As Mary Kay Henderson, she serves as the primary vocalist on a brand-new holiday album, A Very Merry Christmas. The disc features many of this area’s top musicians, including keyboardist, bassist, and vocalist Brad Henderson, who married Harshaw the year after she opened for Lane. He was one of the two instrumentalists with her at that show, and he laughingly remembers the now-quaint digital keyboard and Commodore 64 computer he had onstage that night.
The December after their wedding, they did the first of what would become a long line of Christmas shows, playing a benefit for Muskogee’s Kelly B. Todd Cerebral Palsy Center.
“We put together a team of people we liked playing music with, and, literally, the rest is history,” Henderson notes. “Since then, we have not missed a year of doing at least four or five Christmas concerts every December, usually with three singers, four horns, and a piano, bass, and drums. So it’s a ten-piece group. We go out and do things like the Simple Simon’s [pizza chain] corporate Christmas parties and stuff like that – churches, civic clubs, whoever wants Christmas music.
“Over the years, we’ve worked on arrangements, and when we find one that sticks, one that we like, we add it to the book. When we finished last year’s season, I thought, ‘Why don’t we have a recording of all this? We’re not getting any younger.’ So in January, we started putting tracks together, picking our favorite ones we’d done over the years – or some of our favorites. We couldn’t put ‘em all on one album. Some of those arrangements have been with us for quite a while, and some of them I wrote last year. I even wrote [new] arrangements for the project.”
The result is an engaging, jazzy disc – attributed to “Brad & Mary Kay Henderson with friends” – that reflects not only the decades the musicians have been playing these songs together but also the sterling credentials of the participants themselves, who are some of the very best players around. Those familiar with Tulsa music and musicians, especially in the jazz arena, will immediately recognize names like Rod Clark (trombone), Vic Anderson and Tommy Poole (saxophones), Jared Johnson (drums), and the Hendersons themselves. Then there’s Pat Savage, the veteran Tulsa guitarist Brad and Mary Kay first encountered on a long-ago recording session.
“Yeah, it was way back there,” he recalls. “In fact, it was actually for a cassette.” He laughs. “We didn’t know Pat. We walked into the studio thinking we were going to see [owner] Johnny Graham. But he was busy, so he sent Pat to help us. It was kind of a country-gospel project, and Pat said, ‘This needs some guitar.’
“I don’t play guitar, so I told him, ‘Yeah, but we’re already out of budget.’
“And he said, ‘It needs guitar badly enough that I’d do it for free.’
“I’d never heard him play. I didn’t know he played. But when he broke out his Strat [a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar], I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. Yeah, you’ll do.’”
Other top-drawer musicians on A Very Merry Christmas include vocalists John Ward and Shannon Johnson, trumpeters Scott Copeland and Bill Gable, organist Blair Masters, pianist Sean Giddings, saxophonist Roberto Rabello, French horn player Marsha Wilson, drummer Greg Sadler, and a reed player billed on the liner notes as Dr. Justin Pierce, whom Henderson met when Pierce was the jazz-band director at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee.
Another musician, trumpeter Steve Goforth, is featured on “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” The only instrumental on the whole disc, it carries a distinctly elegiac quality. Goforth died in 2020, following an accident on his ranch near Chelsea.
“He was my best friend, as well as my hunting and fishing buddy,” says Henderson. “He played all the shows with us for many, many years. The basis of that track [‘ O Little Town of Bethlehem’] was on one of his Christmas albums that I produced for him. It was four trumpets, and a shaker, and maybe an upright bass or something. No band to it. Very sparse, and really cool. So I got permission from his widow to edit it and use it, and we just kind of split it up in chunks and added guitar and keyboards and a drum set. That was one of the most fun parts of the project: ‘How do we make this more, and still honor Steve and make him the star of this [track]?’
While the majority of the numbers on A Very Merry Christmas are first-class renditions of secular favorites like “Home for the Holidays” and “Christmas Time Is Here,” the disc concludes with a pair of faith-based numbers, “Hope Has Hands” and “Somewhere It’s Snowing.”
“For Mary Kay and me and some of the guys in the band, our faith is very much a part of what we are,” explains Henderson. “The sacred part is very deliberate. It makes a lot of sense for that to be the final part of the statement. We’re celebrating all this other stuff because we have a reason to celebrate, and that’s the birth of Christ.”
The band will have copies of A Very Merry Christmas for sale at their holiday shows this month. Contact Henderson at [email protected] for ordering information.
